QGIS Planet

In Publishing interactive web maps using QGIS, I presented two plugins for exporting web maps from QGIS. Today, I want to add an new member to this family: the qgis2web plugin is the successor of qgis-ol3 and combines exports to both OpenLayers3 as well as Leaflet.

The plugin is under active development and currently not all features are supported for both OpenLayers3 and Leaflet, but it’s a very convenient way to kick-off a quick webmapping project.

Here’s an example of an OpenLayers3 preview with enabled popups:

OpenLayers3 preview

And here is the same map in Leaflet with the added bonus of a nice address search bar which can be added automatically as well:

Leaflet preview

The workflow is really straight forward: select the desired layers and popup settings, pick some appearance extras, and then don’t forget to hit the Update preview button otherwise you might be wondering why nothing happens ;)

I’ll continue testing these plugins and am looking forward to seeing what features the future will bring.

We all know that QGIS is great for designing maps but did you know that QGIS is also great for interactive web maps? It is! Just check out qgis2leaf and qgis2threejs.

To give these two plugins a test run and learn some responsive web design, I developed a small concept page presenting cycle routes in 3D.

Qgis2leaf makes it possible to generate Leaflet maps from QGIS layers. It provides access to different background maps and it’s easy to replace them in the final HTML file in case you need something more exotic. I also added another layer with custom popups with images but that was done manually.

This is a great way to explore elevation data. I also think that the labeling capabilities add an interesting touch. Controlling the 3D environment takes some getting used to, but if you can handle Google Earth in your browser, this is no different.

This weekend I was updating our map gallery at http://maps.kartoza.com and I wanted to have WMS legends in my maps. The maps are mostly generated using QGIS server which also produces a nice looking graphic for its getLegendGraphic requests. Since Leaflet does not seem have a legend control out of the box, I wrote a small leaflet plugin to do it.

In the future I may extend the control to automatically fetch getLegendGraphics from all loaded WMS layers, but for now it simply takes a complete legend graphic URI as parameter.

Leaflet is a great web mapping client and extending it with little plugins is very easy to do. If you want to use the plugin I wrote, head over to the plugin repository and give it a try!

Today, I’ve been working on some station statistics. From the trip data, I calculated incoming and outgoing trips per station as well as the station’s first day of operations. Combining this information makes it possible to calculate the average day’s “bike balance”. A balanced station has the same number of incoming and outgoing trips while an unbalanced station will either run out of bikes or empty slots for returns.